Are you about to go on a long vacation? Have you read everything by your favorite author, but you still want more? Want to learn about a new subject but don’t know where to start? Ask me for book recommendations at thestranger.com/questionland. Here are some recent matches.
I‘m putting together a birthday package for my girl. I’m trying to find something for her that she’s never read. Her favorites are the lost-generation authors, specifically Ernest Hemingway. Contemporary authors she likes include David Sedaris and Alex Garland, though I know that’s a bit of a gap. She just finished up school, and I’d love to find something for her that she can read for herself as opposed to the English Major Book List. Any suggestions?
Lukeiscool
Hooray for birthday books! Has your lady read anything by Hemingway’s ex-wife Martha Gellhorn? If she hasn’t, you could very well be introducing her to her new favorite author, which will score you major points. Travels with Myself and Another, Gellhorn’s memoir, is a phenomenal book about her relationship with Hemingway and her adventures in journalism around the world. She’s a strong, confident writer in her own right—don’t tell anyone, but I like her stuff better than Hemingway’s—and she’s got a wicked sense of humor. There is a great biography about her, too, called Gellhorn, that would be a good companion volume. It’s not as lively as Gellhorn’s own writing, but it’s interesting.
If she’s already discovered Gellhorn, maybe she hasn’t read George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London? It’s a great book by a great author about bumming around Europe and working in kitchens. It could lead to a lifelong love affair with Orwell books that aren’t 1984 and Animal Farm (Keep the Aspidistra Flying, for instance, is a British Catcher in the Rye; it’s not the best intro to Orwell, but it’s a fantastic book).
And if those are too high-profile for her, you should get her The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy. It’s kind of a lost classic from that generation, recently revived by the New York Review of Books. It’s a hilarious book about an American woman in Europe.
I’m a big fan of pulpy mystery/action novels (Ian Fleming, The Thin Man, etc.), but I need a change of pace and a few classy books to impress my girlfriend. Right now I’m reading John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead and really enjoying it. Any recommendations along that line? Any recommendations along the lines of Fleming or The Thin Man (I can’t totally deny my need for fast-paced novels)?
Sorry for not giving you much to go on. I will give anything a try. Thanks for the help.
Michael In Ballard
I feel as though I’ve stepped into the middle of a romantic comedy about a brainy girl and the cool, unbookish guy who loves her. First, I am compelled to say that there’s absolutely no shame in liking Fleming and The Thin Man. (You might like Raymond Chandler, too, and his slightly less cool but much more pulpy cousin Jim Thompson.)
That said, let’s get you laid.
If you like Whitehead, and John Henry Days is suitably impressive for the lady you’re into—I love JHD, by the way—I bet you’ll like Michael Chabon. His newest novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, is a mystery, but it’s also a weird alternate-history deal. Chabon is incredibly nerdy, but the ladies love him. Likewise with Jonathan Lethem. The last time he was in town, the audience was evenly split between men and women, which is a rarity in the world of readings.
But if you’re looking for classy literature (classy as in will-one-day-win-the-Nobel-Prize) that is speedy, plot-based, and a kick in the pants to read, you should both read some Haruki Murakami. Start with either Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World or Sputnik Sweetheart. Eventually build up to Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Murakami translates Chandler novels into Japanese, and his writing carries some of that same punchy, quick-moving style. It will appeal to the Dashiell Hammett fan in you, and you’ll be broadening your scope incredibly.
And everybody—man, woman, gay, straight, classy, raunchy—loves Patricia Highsmith.
I loved The Children’s Hospital, Moby-Dick, Lorrie Moore’s “How to Become a Writer,” East of Eden, Icelander, Alice Munro’s “Labor Day Dinner,” Borges’s “The Aleph,” Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Sweet Thursday, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse.”
I also enjoyed Longitude and The Discoverers.
What should I read?
Best, Jenny
First, my compliments: You read some really great stuff. It’s nice to see someone who enjoys dense books and also ventures into science fiction and fantasy.
If you enjoyed The Children’s Hospital, have you read Chris Adrian’s debut novel, Gob’s Grief? I enjoyed it more than Children’s—I’m totally in the minority, I know—and it’s about Walt Whitman and a man who builds a machine to bring back the Civil War dead. It’s a really great book.
I’ve noticed that you don’t venture much into postmodernism with your examples, but I would urge you to give David Foster Wallace a try. If Infinite Jest has been ruined for you by the kind of people who read Infinite Jest, you might want to try The Broom of the System. But he’s smart and funny and meticulous in a very Melville kind of way.
Carlos Fuentes might be up your alley, as well. I prefer Terra Nostra, his enormous, sweeping epic. It’s like all of Mexico in one novel.
And for shorter stories, Amy Hempel is one of the best around. She knocks my socks off, and I bet you’ll like her if you like Moore and Munro.
Let me know what you think.
What a quick and thorough response!
I did read Gob’s Grief. I’ve read a book of DFW short stories but not tried out his novels. So I’ll go there and then work my way down your list. Thanks so much, mister!
Jenny
Get your own personal book recommendations from Paul Constant in Questionland!
I can’t say much about the other recommendations but Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is hardly fast moving. Glacially slow, I’d say.
I’m an admirer of ‘Armor’ by John Steakley and ‘Anvil of the Heart’ by Bruce T. Holmes.
I also dug ‘Watchers’, but most of Koontz’s other works failed to stay with me.
I did read ‘Vampires Inc.’ by Steakley (failed to stick) and Bruce sent me a copy of a late work which I’m enjoying very much.
I’m currently reading ‘Matter’ by that Scottish fellow which is a good yarn, but so far hasn’t hit me in the vitals.
I’ve read a stack of fiction novels that would certainly reach the ceiling, but I can’t say that I even remember most of their titles except for ‘The Road’ and ‘American Gods’
I threw away ‘Road’ 25 seconds after completion. Partially for aesthetic reasons and partially because I’m also working on a post apacalyptic novel, though in a completely different vein. Namely that my characters have more than two dimensions, face more than three variations of the same dilemma, and I use punctuation.
I threw away ‘American Gods’ at the halfway mark because it bored me to tears. He caught my attention for fifty pages, and then lost it again. I can’t even remember who wrote it, and I don’t particularly care unless it’s to avoid buying another of his works.
But ‘Armor’ and ‘Anvil’: those were good.
Apologies. I just registered and I think this post landed in someone else’s thread.
Michael –
Oh man, I say embrace your true self with attractive self possession, and just read what you like with confidence and let all this female literary snobbery go. I can’t tell you how many poor guys I see at the library who are being guilted by their girlfriends or spouses for “not really reading,” meaning reading non-fiction, or adventure, or mystery, or anything the lovely lady happens to disregard. Pshaw, I say!
Have you ever tried Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise books? They’re fantastic – she’s like a kinder, gentler James Bond with a phenomenal body, gifts of mind control, and a McGiver like ability to get out of scrapes w/ handy objects, like a wooden leg, for instance. She has a cockney sidekick who is a world class knife thrower, too. The books vary a little in quality, but are mostly masterpieces of pure escapist joy. The first is simple called “Modesty Blaise.”
Another fun series that is kind of a tribute to Fleming’s Bond is a series written under the pen name Forrest DeVoe Jr., beginning with “Into the Volcano.” Very Bondian, but not in that stupid Austin Powers sort of way.
I also highly recommend Geoffrey Household’s exquisite 1939 man-on-the-run novel, “Rogue Male.” More happens in the first five pages of that book than in most whole novels. Also, if you haven’t read Eric Ambler’s first 5 or 6 books, they’re perfect, and pretty much who Graham Greene modeled his own thrillers after. And Ross Thomas’s wry Cold War and crime thrillers are really fun and not so well known.
You’ll get some of the same thrills, and maybe a little more respect from your girlfriend with a book like James Meek’s “The People’s Act of Love,” which is darkly fascinating and quite thrilling, and literary as hell. Or have some fun with something hip and (in)sensitive, like Sam Lipsyte’s “The Ask,” or John Tropper’s “The Book of Joe,” which will have her feeling like she should maybe be reading some “guy stuff.”
Or dive in the deep end w/ Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment.” Totally fasinating, often in a sweaty-palmed way, and yet gets you MEGA literary cred.
David (Fiction librarian at Seattle Public Library & author of Booklist’s “HE READS” column).
PS – to the guy who liked “Armor” (and if there IS such a thing as a ‘guy book,’ that has to be one of the all time greats – for those who don’t know it, it is somewhere in the neighborhood of “Starship Troopers” and Joe Haldeman’s “Forever War;” Men and machines, men AS machines, and the horrors of war) – for that guy, may I suggest Alfred Bester’s “The Stars My Destination,” a terrific title about this poor schlub who is basically left to die in deep space, and goes through some memorable physical and metaphysical changes in seeking revenge against those who left him. Terrific. Also Eric Frank Russell’s “Wasp,” a very compelling military SF about a huge alien empire brought to its knees through the clever freedom fighting/terrorism of just one man. Relevant? You bet – and also impossible to put down.
Jenny – what a wonderfully adventuresome, eclectic reader you seem to be! I’d add to Paul’s picks that you might enjoy Stephen Millhauser, with his distinctly American brand of Magical Realism. And as someone who “loved” Moby Dick (really? ALL of it??), it makes me wonder if you might be one of the few readers who actually enjoys – or at any rate finishes – William Vollmann. Read a few reviews of his latest Non-fiction – “Imperial” – and if those don’t send you screaming the other way, give him a try. AND his brilliant, heartbreaking, beautiful antecedent, James Agee’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” (Insert obligatory Don DeLillo recommendation here.. um, okay, Underworld).
Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation by Noel Riley Fitch is a good book about the lost generation.
For the gentleman who loved James Bond but is looking for something a bit more highfalutin, let me recommend THE MORTDECAI TRILOGY by Kyril Bonfiglioli. They are three astonishingly weird, funny, suspenseful books about a corrupt, louche art dealer who gets mixed up in all kinds of globe-trotting shenanigans.